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32. Badiou and Nancy: Political AnimalsIn Sanja Dejanovic (ed.), Nancy and the Political, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 43-65. 2015.
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14Not More of the SamePhilosophy Today 63 (2): 513-533. 2019.Much French philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by the positive valorization of alterity, an ethical position that has recently received a vigorous assault from Alain Badiou’s privilege of sameness. This article argues that Badiou shares a great deal in common with the philosophies of alterity from which he seeks to distance himself, and that Michel Serres’s little-known account of alterity offers a much more radical alternative to the ethics of diff…Read more
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7Gilles DeleuzeP&R Publishing. 2020.Gilles Deleuze's ideas are indispensable to understanding how truth and ethics no longer have theological reference points. Watkin's biblical critique enables us to culturally reengage with our Deleuze-influenced society.
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6New interdisciplinary perspectives on and beyond autonomy (edited book)Routledge. 2022.What does 'autonomy' mean today? Is the Enlightenment understanding of autonomy still relevant for contemporary challenges? How have the limits and possibilities of autonomy been transformed by recent developments in artificial intelligence and big data, political pressures, intersecting oppressions and the climate emergency? The challenges to autonomy today reach across society with unprecedented complexity, and in this book leading scholars from philosophy, economics, linguistics, literature a…Read more
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13Nancy is a Thinker of Radical EmancipationAngelaki 26 (3-4): 225-238. 2021.Nancy has been criticised for rejecting the politics of emancipation that characterises the thought of some of his more militant contemporaries. To be sure, he does distance himself from the rhetoric of emancipation. He considers that the grand modern emancipation narrative of the Enlightenment, and of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, expired with the end of the Cold War, and that the ideal of emancipation carried by this narrative is dangerous insofar as it imposes “ultimate sens…Read more
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14Why Michel Serres?Substance 48 (3): 30-40. 2019.On 2 June I woke to the news that Michel Serres, philosopher, mountaineer, broadcaster, grandfather, historian of science, lover of rugby, mathematician, and inimitable writer, had passed away at the age of 88. This sad news came at a moment when I found myself deeply immersed in Serres’ writing, putting the finishing touches to a monograph on his work. In the days that followed his death I found myself reflecting at length on the fascination that Serres’ thought has held for me since my first, …Read more
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22Michel FoucaultP&R. 2018.Hugely influential, Michel Foucault's work has not only impacted a diverse range of disciplines—from history and sociology to fine arts, feminism, and gay and lesbian studies—but has also profoundly shaped Western culture at a street level. Yet until now there has been no overarching systematic approach to his work from a Reformed perspective—let alone one that is as fair and accessible as Watkin's. After walking us through key elements of Foucault's thought, Watkin both critiques and answers Fo…Read more
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93Michel Serres: Figures of ThoughtEup. 2020.Michel Serres is a major twentieth-century thinker who has made decisive contributions to major debates across disciplines ranging from the history of science to literary studies and philosophy. This is the first monograph to offer a comprehensive assessment of Serres’ thought from his early work on Leibniz to his final publications in 2019. The first three chapters carefully explore Serres’ ‘global intuition’, how he understands and engages with the world, and his characteristic ‘figures of tho…Read more
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749Not More of the Same: Michel Serres’s Challenge to the Ethics of AlteritySubstance 63 (2): 513-533. 2019.Much French philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by the positive valorization of alterity, an ethical position that has recently received a vigorous assault from Alain Badiou’s privilege of sameness. This article argues that Badiou shares a great deal in common with the philosophies of alterity from which he seeks to distance himself, and that Michel Serres’s little-known account of alterity offers a much more radical alternative to the ethics of diff…Read more
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28PostmodernismIn Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 138-151. 2019.We trace the genealogy and tensions of postmodern atheism through a series of encounters: Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche's “God is dead,” Foucault's critique of Sartre's humanism, Jean‐Luc Nancy's rejection of Alain Badiou's atheism, and the questions Derrida raises about Nancy's own position. We argue that there are plural postmodern atheisms, each of which defends its own claim to be following through on the consequences of the death of God more radically than the alternatives.
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31Thinking Equality Today: Badiou, Rancière, NancyFrench Studies 67 (4): 522-534. 2013.Recent work on Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière has rightly identified equality both as a central theme in their own thinking and as the key notion in contemporary radical political thought more broadly, but a focus on the differences between their respective accounts of equality has failed to clarify a major problem that they share. The problem is that human equality is said to rest on a particular human capacity, leaving Badiou's axiomatic equality and Rancière's assumed equality vulnerable t…Read more
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If My Brain Is Damaged, Do I Become a Different Person? Catherine Malabou and Neuro-identityIn Nicholas Monk, Mia Lindgren, Sarah McDonald & Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou (eds.), Reconstructing Identity: A Transdisciplinary Approach, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 21-40. 2017.The growing field of neuro-philosophy throws up important issues for our society about how we understand the persistence of personal identity over time: if my brain is damaged or otherwise altered, do I become a different person? This chapter explores some of the work of the French neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou as she asks, and tries to answer, this fundamental question about who we think we are, giving a non-reductive materialist account of self-identity. I argue that Malabou has implicit…Read more
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20Jacques DerridaP&R. 2017.One of the most important thinkers of our time, Jacques Derrida continues to have a profound influence on postmodern thought and society. Christopher Watkin explains Derrida's complex philosophy with clarity and precision, showing not only what Derrida says about metaphysics, ethics, politics, and theology but also what assumptions and commitments underlie his positions. He then brings Derrida into conversation with Reformed theology through the lens of John 1:118, examining both similarities an…Read more
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356Michel Serres: From restricted to general ecologyIn Stephanie Posthumus & Daniel Finch-Race (eds.), French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century, Peter Lang. pp. 153-172. 2017.Michel Serres's relation to ecocriticism is complex. On the one hand, he is a pioneer in the area, anticipating the current fashion for ecological thought by over a decade. On the other hand, 'ecology' and 'eco-criticism' are singularly infelicitous terms to describe Serres's thinking if they are taken to indicate that attention should be paid to particular 'environmental' concerns. For Serres, such local, circumscribed ideas as 'ecology' or 'eco-philosophy' are one of the causes of our ecologic…Read more
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16Reading Genesis 1 and 2, we are tempted to see only problems to solve. Yet these two chapters burst with glorious truths about God, our world, and ourselves. In fact, their foundational doctrines are among the richest sources of insight as we pursue robust, sensitive, and constructive engagement with others about contemporary culture and ideas. With deftness and clarity, Christopher Watkin reclaims the Trinity and creation from their cultural despisers and shows how they speak into, question, an…Read more
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480Representing French and Francophone Studies with Michel SerresAustralian Journal of French Studies 56 (2): 125-140. 2019.
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51French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and LatourEdinburgh University Press. 2016.Contemporary French philosophy is laying fresh claim to the human. Through a series of independent, simultaneous initiatives, arising in the writing of diverse current French thinkers, the figured of the human is being transformed and reworked. Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils inherent in these attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and even to our o…Read more
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14Ricœur and the Autonomy of Philosophy: A ReappraisalPhilosophy Today 58 (3): 411-425. 2004.Paul Ricoeur repeatedly maintained that his philosophical reflection was autonomous from theological influence. Those who seek to contest this view have hitherto sought to deny the autonomy of philosophy from theology, but this article makes a more radical argument: not that philosophy is not autonomous, but that autonomy is not philosophical. According to Ricoeur’s own understanding of the structure of philosophical systems, the very notion of autonomy to which philosophy makes claim can only b…Read more
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30Rewriting the Death of the Author: Rancièrian ReflectionsPhilosophy and Literature 39 (1): 32-46. 2015.It is possible to study the idea of the “death of the author” as a quaint museum piece of faded 1960s structuralist memorabilia, as an idea that characterized an era that, whatever it once was, is certainly not our own. Such a presentation is the fare in countless graduate literature courses and a sin to which some, if not many, of us would plead guilty. However, the idea of the death or disappearance of the author has, since the two inaugural essays that launched its theoretical voyage,1 genera…Read more
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9Proving the principle of logic: Quentin Meillassoux, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the anhypotheticalIn Admir Skodo (ed.), Other Logics: Alternatives to Formal Logic in the History of Thought and Contemporary Philosophy, Brill. pp. 26-43. 2014.
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25Ricœur and the Autonomy of Philosophy: A ReappraisalPhilosophy Today 58 (3): 411-425. 2014.Paul Ricoeur repeatedly maintained that his philosophical reflection was autonomous from theological influence. Those who seek to contest this view have hitherto sought to deny the autonomy of philosophy from theology, but this article makes a more radical argument: not that philosophy is not autonomous, but that autonomy is not philosophical. According to Ricoeur’s own understanding of the structure of philosophical systems, the very notion of autonomy to which philosophy makes claim can only b…Read more
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3Paul Ricoeur and the possibility of just loveIn Norman Wirzba & Bruce Ellis Benson (eds.), Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love's Wisdom, Indiana University Press. pp. 73-83. 2008.
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4Paul Ricoeur and the threatened selfIn Georgina Evans & Adam Kay (eds.), Threat: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture, Peter Lang. pp. 217-232. 2010.
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47Michel Serres' Great Story: From Biosemiotics to EconarratologySubstance 44 (3): 171-187. 2015.From the background noise, nothing follows. Or sometimes. But that’s another story. From the five volumes of his Hermès series and through to The Natural Contract in 1990, Michel Serres has rooted the origins of human language firmly in the rhythms and calls of the natural world.1 To date, the Anglophone reception of this complex and varied oeuvre has been slender to the point of emaciation, but one area where he has received some small fraction of the attention he deserves is in his elaboration…Read more
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10Phenomenology or Deconstruction?: The Question of Ontology in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-Luc NancyEdinburgh Univeristy Press. 2009."Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida's engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of 'being' and 'presence' that exposes significant blindspots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction…Read more
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2Making ethical senseIn Lorna Collins & Elizabeth Rush (eds.), Making Sense: For an Effective Aesthetics, Peter Lang. pp. 51-54. 2011.A reflection on "sense" in the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy
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5Dancing equality: Image, imitation and participationIn Carrie Giunta & Adrienne Janus (eds.), Nancy and Visual Culture, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 39-54. 2016.This chapter wagers that dance holds a singular, irreducible place in Nancy's work, that it cannot be reduced to thought about dance, and that it provides a way to understanding Nancy's approach to visual culture in general, to equality, and to the circulation of sense in terms of what he calls singular plural being. The chapter takes its starting point from Nancy's discussions of dance in the as yet untranslated Allitérations, a series of email exchanges from 2003 and 2004 followed by transcrip…Read more
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6From Plato to Postmodernism presents the cultural history of the West in one concise volume. Nearly four thousand years of Western history are woven together into an unfolding story in which we see how movements and individuals contributed to the philosophy, literature and art that have shaped today's world. The story begins with the West's Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins, moving through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romanticism to twenty-first century postmodernity. Th…Read more
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39Difficult atheism: post-theological thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin MeillassouxEdinburgh University Press. 2011.Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.
Areas of Specialization
4 more
Continental Philosophy |
Atheism and Agnosticism |
Jean-Luc Nancy |
Alain Badiou |
Jacques Derrida |
Gilles Deleuze |
Michel Foucault |
Speculative Realism |
Paul Ricoeur |